Friday, 3 March 2017

For Ford the future of shopping is through drones and autonomous vehicles

For several months now we have seen various projects that propose a change in the way of distributing packages. Amazon bets on the drones and has even been granted a patent for a kind of flying store . UPS has been another company that has shown its vision of how deliveries will be in a few years based on drones. And today Ford presents his proposal.

The idea / concept of Ford is the most futuristic and even utopian if we compare it with the other two, but this does not stop being interesting and attractive. Here we have a scenario in which many have been: we live in a building, we have visitors and we have not prepared the dishes, besides we do not have the necessary ingredients. Yes, we know that it is a lack of planning, but we ignore that issue and know the proposal presented by Ford.

Ford Autolivery Concept

During the past MWC 2017, Ford introduced the concept of something called 'autolivery', which is a vision of how we will make purchases in the future. Everything is based on a holographic interface, which may well be through projections or using glasses of augmented reality or mixed, here everything would be linked to each other, which in theory would let us know if we have the necessary ingredients to prepare the one Dish we want.

If this is not the case, we can activate the 'autolivery' service to receive everything we have ordered at home, something that could also be done by our own refrigerator automatically. The interesting part will be the form of delivery, as it is based on an autonomous van and drones, because the latter would be in charge of delivering on high floors.

This could not only be used for packages in urban areas, but also for the delivery of medicines urgently in areas of difficult access, such as towers or mountains, as the company says the 15-meter radius is considered the most complex area For casting companies, so many are thinking of drones as a solution.

This autonomous distribution platform is based on software created by Argo AI, a relatively unknown company in which Ford has just invested billions of dollars to make this project a reality. This software allows real-time monitoring of vehicles and scheduling drones for automatic deliveries. According to Ford, its first fleet of delivery services will be operational in 2021.